Hi Blackmagic,We've been using Blackmagic for the last 2 years in both development and heavy production environments. We capture hundreds of 2 minute videos per day in one of the UK's biggest arena's using your hardware. We've used a variety of your hardware including.

Blackmagic Intensity Extreme

Blackmagic DeckLink Mini PCI

Blackmagic DeckLink Mini Thunderbolt

Blackmagic DeckLink Quad

Blackmagic, you seem to have drivers that support AVFoundation. This can't possibly be an accident. You must have taken the time to write drivers to support AVFoundation. I know, I've done kernel programming before and it's not a fun job.

Not only this, but I'm guessing that you didn't write drivers to support the massive list of applications in the tech specs section of all of your products without the use of AVFoundation. I have the list below for you.

DaVinci Resolve

Fusion

Final Cut Pro X

Premiere Pro CC

Avid Media Composer

After Effects CC

Avid Pro Tools

Steinberg Cubase

Autodesk Smoke

Photoshop CC

Nuke

Steinberg Nuendo

Avid Symphony

Avid News Cutter

Tools On Air just:in & live:cut & just:play & just:live

Softron OnTheAir

MovieRecorder and OnTheAir CG

Flash Media Encoder

Wirecast

Livestream Procaster

Resolume Avenue 4

Sony Vegas Pro

Corel VideoStudio Pro X4

CyberLink Power Director

MAGIX Video Pro X4

Vidblaster Pro & Studio & Broadcast

Uniplay

Playbox AirBox

CasparCG

Magicsoft CG

Xsplit Broadcaster

Imagine Communications Velocity

InfoCaster.

What confuses me is that, despite the list above, none of your products work reliably with AVFoundation. For the past year we've battled with getting AVFoundation to work with your products. I've had a look around and it's not just us. Here's a list of issues that we have encountered as well as other developers.

Audio sometimes falls out of sync with video, to get around this, we have to restart the capture session at regular intervals

In Yosemite, your latest drivers kind of work. When I say kind of, on the DeckLink Mini PCI, the capture session opens once, if you close the session and re-open it (restart the app) you get a black screen, this is essential if you want to change the capture settings! To get around this, you need to set your settings, persist them and then I kid you not, restart your mac! Downgrading drivers to 9 kind of resolves this.

The DeckLink Quad will change inputs when you restart OS X sometimes. This is beyond annoying, we were onsite for 4 hours trying to debug the problem until we realised that to get around it, we had to unplug the mini BNC cables and plug them into random ports until we got our picture back. Because of this, we have 2 DeckLink Quads in the office that we've taken out of service and are now using as paper weights

Sometimes, you get a black screen in AVFoundation when you open a Capture Session, to get around it, you need to do what we call the Blackmagic dance. This involves waiting for 3 seconds after the capture session initially opens, change the resolution and frame-rate to something other than the current one, wait 5 seconds, change them back to the one that we want and voila, the picture appears

HDMI is unreliable across all of your products... period

So far, we've tolerated the inconsistencies with your hardware. You "kind of" support AVFoundation but won't say on these forums whether you actually truly support it.

We've phoned for technical support numerous times and have had to pull our equipment out of the field and bring them back into our office to do a full rig test assuming that it's an issue onsite. Turns out, it was just something wrong with Blackmagic.

The sheer mention of using Blackmagic hardware in our office sends chills down our developers spines.

Surely you'd want to place a nice big fat AVFoundation logo on your supported software page. I guarantee that this will attract more developers to your hardware as it opens the doors to using high end equipment with code that we know and love.

Blackmagic, your development community is begging for answers to some of the questions above. The most important one being, will you commit to AVFoundation? It is the gateway drug to using your SDK. If dev's stumble at the first hurdle, they won't complete the race and will resort to using webcams for apps and interactive installations.

Supporting vendor frameworks such as CoreMedia, DirectShow and WDM is quite difficult as it is difficultto locate problems which may exist in the Blackmagic plugins, applications which use the framework or in the framework itself.

All Blackmagic software and most third party software uses the Blackmagic Desktop Video SDK which provides a native API for directly accessing the full capabilities of DeckLink cards. The CoreMedia pluginsare built on top of this API.

I would suggest taking a look at the SDK as it is by far the most powerful way of interfacing with all thefeatures of the DeckLink, Intensity, Multibridge and UltraStudio product lines.

Hi Daniel,So just to be clear, Blackmagic doesn't officially support AVFoundation out of the box. We know from experience that no Blackmagic hardware is detected unless we install drivers when using AVFoundation.

We also resort to using Desktop Video/Studio which you provide to test things if the above doesn't work. The same issues that I note above also appear in your own software, especially when using the DeckLink Quad in Mavericks or Yosemite. Would it be possible to get an answer on the points in my original post?

It may also help us and other developers if there's a clear way to use the SDK to take data from your cards using your SDK and pass that data over to other frameworks in OS X. This will allow us all to have the flexibility of Core Video and Core Audio when using your hardware and all of it's features.

I have no doubt that your SDK is great, but it's all C based which can be a steep learning curve for some Objective-C developers.

The Desktop Video install is required to access Blackmagic Desktop Video devices on any platform, using any framework.

Note that the SDK includes comprehensive documentation and quite a few example applications to check out.

If you are experiencing issues with a specific product or feature, please report it separately from any other issues and include sufficient information for engineering to check it out. Key information is:

All BlackMagic needs to include include a single app (w/source code) that demos video/audio capture and playback using AVFoundation wired into BMD's own SDK. That would be fine, in my mind -- and would appease the issue somewhat. A quick forum search would reveal that I've been asking for this for quite some time, which no official response.

To do so, they should employ the likes of Bob McCune and/or Chris Adamson, both of whom have recently authored seminal books on AVFoundation and CoreAudio, respectively: (Disclosure: I do not know these two).

Meanwhile, the UltraStudio 4K unit I have remains under-utilized for development, with a potential for multiple US-4K deployments in broadcast environments and Canadian pro sports teams (NHL/CFL/MLS) with which I been involved with for 28+ years.

I can only support this here. It would be awesome if Blackmagic would implement proper CoreMediaIO drivers. So every application that is using AVFoundation would have access to the devices without custom code.

Thank you all for your suggestions and comments on AVFoundation. We appreciate your feedback on Core Media and AVFoundation.

Software developers have successfully used our C++ SDK in many different application areas and we appreciate your request for enhanced support for AV Foundation and Core Media. We hear you and understand why this is important to you.

Our goal is to support all sizes of developers and that is why Blackmagic Designs desktop video SDK is easy to download from our website via a simple registration. Also, the SDK has no financial or contract requirement for licensing other then agreement to the online license document. Also, as noted earlier, our SDK provides a deeper and more efficient level of hardware and software control than generalized APIs.

We do not comment on future plans nor do we pre-announce support for APIs so if and when we have an update on support for specific API, we will announce it here ASAP.

I challenge BMD SDK creators to just take a bit of time to look at Apple's direction in the A/V realm. For example, check out the WWDC videos from the last couple of years.

The result will be clear: AVFoundation is their path.

And yet BMD seems to be entirely disinterested in supporting AVFoundation. Do they not have the resources for writing a simple set of wrapper classes? Such a thing could access its SDK -- but do so with using the underlying video pixel & audio buffers provided by a simple AVPlayer (for example) in AVFoundation. Think about that... just how a simple video player (and capture demo) would help many a Mac developer with sample code to run with, opening up BMD devices to more widespread acceptance on the Mac platform.

Is there any movement on this? Using black magic Intensity Pro 4k and what could be multiple studios if I was able to utilize the capture card with AVFoundations, not to mention how many users could use the capture card to capture directly into FCPX if the support were there for this.

If BlackMagic won't listen to reason, has anyone considered starting an open source project to write a CoreMediaIO driver so the video and audio would be included as an AVCaptureDevice?